If the world’s population lived like... (infographic) | Hacker News Reader

If the world’s population lived like... (infographic)

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I did not know paris was so dense!

I wish people could input their own cites and of course other type of dynamic data. e.g water consumption. I guess that kind of dynamic infographic is what Erick Schonfeld was talking about. [1]

[1] http://erickschonfeld.com/2012/06/28/infographics-broken/

It's surprisingly dense given it has had a prohibition on tall buildings since forever. Of course, some buildings are more equal than others and their project went through: tour Montparnasse, some residential projects. If this restriction was removed, I'm pretty sure new developments would resemble dense asian cities and real estate prices would drop. But hey, falling housing prices are bad in political economics, 'mkay ?

Many European cities have height restrictions for buildings within the old city center to preserve the traditional architecture. The financial district just outside the center has no height limit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_D%C3%A9fense

NYC and Tokyo are very tall and dense and mor expensive than Seattle which has height limits. You are overlooking the factor of how density begets density.

When you look at the last few lived-like countries in the list, including the US, keep in mind that we use resources like drunken sailors because we can. We have much more land and resources than we need, so we trade long term waste for short term cost.

I think it's reasonable to assume that we could, if we decided, be much better at using, reusing and conserving our resources. And if we did that, it would be possible for the rest of the world to bring their standard of living up to the US or better, and still not use multiples of the world's available resources.

If that's what we decided.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/

Why didn't I know about this. My evening has been forfeited for my Randallicious overlord.

I would love to see this infographic with the Kowloon Walled City at its heyday.

With the density of Kwoloon Walled City (~1,255,000/km^2 in 1987 according to wikipedia), the earth's population would comfortably fit in Delaware[0]: 6.9 billion people would fit into 5498km^2, DE is 6447km^2

Worldwide, the best match would be Olt in Romania (http://goo.gl/maps/i8I02) which is precisely 5498km^2

For full-fledged countries, Brunei[1] at 5765km^2

[0] US map for scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Delaware_in_United_States_...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunei

The world is not a zero-sum game.

We only have resources of one planet to share among the entire population, so I think it's safe to say that it is a zero-sum game.

Assuming of course, we don't end up going into space.

The earth's not a closed system, it's powered by the Sun.

--MC Hawking.

The solar flux is reasonably constant and finite.

Various cycles (CO2, nitrogen, water, soil) are also relatively finite. We've been perturbing several of these for quite some time, with ultimate effects we can't really know.

Not to mention any natural variability within the system.

Scary thought.

It would be interesting to see this compared to how much of the world's resources we were using x years ago.

You can compare US (or other post industrial, consumer based countries) with India and other countries heading towards post industrial consumerism. They being example of resource usage X years ago

Conterminous? I learn something new on HN every day, but new words are unusual.

Animal meat, which has an enormous ecological footprint, is on its way out. I'm not a vegetarian, so I'm not saying this on top of some moral high horse, but it's inefficient and the way animals are raised and slaughtered now is insanely cruel. We'll have credible plant-based meats in 20 years, easily. In 150 years, eating actual animals will be this nostalgic and slightly goofy thing that rich people do, like fox hunting in England, because cow steaks will cost hundreds of dollars (rarity) while plant steaks that taste exactly like the real thing (or better) will be effectively free.

No one knows when Peak Oil will hit or how it will play out, and I'm concerned about it, but I think the long-term outcome is that (a) we'll be fine (although we may get hurt bad by it in the short-term) and (b) objections to nuclear power will vanish. In 50 years, we'll probably be using very cheap, environmentally safe nuclear power, and able to produce food in vertical greenhouses.

The world's population will likely peak around 9.5-10 billion and then begin declining because people are having fewer children.

So I don't think we're in danger of a Malthusian catastrophe, aside from the fact that the developing world is already in one. We're actually coming out of the Malthusian era. Malthus was wrong about the mathematics (economic growth is exponential; it was just so slow-- below 1%-- before the Industrial Revolution that it looked linear) but he was right about the population dynamics of pretty much every pre-industrial society.

Thanks for a good laugh. FYI fox hunting is banned and your horse is high enough to use for hunting.

> credible plant-based meats in 20 years

What is a plant-based meat? I don't know of any plants with muscles.

I downvoted you because you made zero effort in researching what the OP said before acting so dismissive. Depending on where you live, it's possible you never eaten nor seen meat substitutes made of soy, but before refuting a claim you should check some facts, not make a claim based on your own lack of knowledge about the subject. "I've never seen something therefore it must not exist".

Meat substitutes are not meat.

Op's whole post was about meat substitutes. It was about replacing real meat with something else, a substitute. Op happens to call that substitute "plant based meat". In the context of his post, there is no confusion about what he could have meant.

It's too bad michaelochurch didn't just say "plant protein" vs "animal protein", we could have avoided this inevitable nitpicking over technical details and semantics.

Neither you or alexchamberlain actually address his underlying point, so I downvoted you too.

Meat is animal muscle; plants don't have muscle.

I have chosen to avoid meat substitutes, but I am aware of Quorn. I just didn't read the OPs post like that.

Soy meat products are absolutely awful. They fail to compete with everything but the most processed cheap meats. Soy hamburgers aren't even as good as the cheapest crappiest frozen bulk-store beef patties. They are a far far cry from being able to compete with a fresh patty made with fresh chuck.

One of the biggest follies of the soy meat industry is trying to make their products healthy by default. Until they may a soy-based animal fat alternative, they don't have a fighting chance of competing. People who truly enjoy meat realize the importance of fatty tissue and how it contributes to flavor.

Go eat a slice of nicely prepared picanha, fat rind and all, and then show me a soy-based product that is even in the same ballpark.

Actually, soy "meat" doesn't even get that far - if you look at the nutrition information on a soy burger patty you'll find that it's full of fat. Like, ludicrous portions of fat that would compete with the fattiest ground beef you can buy.

And it still tastes awful.

In fact, if you look at a lot of soy meat substitutes out there, a lot of them are not at all good for you. The whole "soy meat healthier than real meat" thing is pure perception.

Interesting. I'm going to have to check out the product packaging next time I'm in the supermarket.

I disagree, I much prefer the flavored soy patties eg BocaBurger brand to real hamburgers. They're also easier to prepare (just microwave) and with good mustard, delicious. The problem is that they cost substantially more than ground hamburger, not less (must be the vegan/"organic" lifestyle premium).

Human populations, as with any other animal, grow exponentially until a point where the environment can no longer sustain such growth. You can of course use technology to push that further away (case in point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process). Eventually, though, you'll always get there: that's why plainly stating "humans will have fewer childs" is... I guess naive at best, deceptive at worst (humans will have fewer childs because no one will have the opportunity to).

What happened here is that one particular luxury (meat) was cherry-picked, out of ideology, and then coated in the veil of population growth and sustenance.

Thats distorting the point, because as the population continues to grow exponentially, any luxury will eventually subside. That can be a car, electricity, a toilet, more than a few square feet for yourself or your basic human rights.

> "Human populations, as with any other animal, grow exponentially"

The "populations grow exponentially" argument was state of the art in 1798 [-1], but modern science has taught us that populations grow roughly logistically [0], not exponentially. It's easy to mistake for an exponential in the lower part of the curve (which is all the data we had in 1798), but once you know what to look for, you can see the difference clearly [1].

Of particular note, "exponential growth" means you'll see the same percentage growth rate every year, and larger and larger absolute growth. But what we actually see in humanity is that the percentage growth rate maxed out in the mid 1960s (about 2.2%; it's presently below 1.1%) and the absolute growth rate was at its peak in the late 1980s (88 million in 1989, down to about 75 million now) [2].

Every credible estimate of peak human population puts the number in the 9-12 billion range [3]. That's a lot of people, and will perhaps require some cutbacks, but it's nowhere near the dire levels you predict.

[-1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Po... is the origin of the idea

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_m...

[1] http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil_files/image...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_populat...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growt...

It's not even very interesting if the growth is logistically or exponentially. The point is: there is significant growth. And it doesn't stop until you reach the limit of what the environment can carry. You say that number is projected to be 9-12 billion.

And then we run out of oil. What happens as the mortality skyrockets and humanity downsizes to the new carrying capacity?

I'm more concerned with rising mean global temperatures rendering areas surrounding the equator uninhabitable, when the average temperature gets up near 40c. You won't be able to grow crops anymore, and it will drive people away. If you move the human habitable zone away from the equator, you have less and less land, and even less flatland for ariable farming. So besides the slash and burn land quality loss, you are potentially losing degrees of latitude of ariable space.

> "It's not even very interesting if the growth is logistically or exponentially."

It very much matters which it is. It's the difference between stabilizing at 20% more population than we currently have and dealing with a little more overcrowding, and getting so crowded that we don't have toilets any more.

Running out of oil is going to change American lifestyles significantly. I'm not convinced it's going to change global carrying capacity by very much, though. Do you have a credible model that says otherwise? I would like to see such a thing (in its fullest form.)

Logistic is effectively the same model as "exponential until pressure from a ceiling is applied". Look at formula for its derivative, it is the exponential multiplied by a factor that goes to zero as the ceiling is approached.

The models are effectively identical, until they're not. In particular, they're not identical for the purposes of this discussion.

"Until pressure from a ceiling is applied" is the difference between stabilizing at 9 billion people (a bit more crowded than right now), and growing to so many billions or trillions that the grandparent poster's "no more toilets" prediction would be realistic.

There are actually quite a few documented problems with soy consumption.

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/soy-scrutiny/#axzz1uJmF0GoG

IIRC, you can grow fish-steaks in petrie dishes. The researchers who first did it claimed not to have eaten it (for legal reasons), but claim it smelt OK, when fried in butter.

Mince would be easy to make. A real cut of meat (like a rib-eye) would be much harder, but if it's $5/pound for mince "steaks" (patties) and $30/pound for real steaks (massive world-wide demand for tender cuts, but no demand for the tough bits which used to go in hamburgers) then ... well ... people will go for the mince.

And science will eventually give us 100% artificial steaks. Delicious, lab grown meat.

Take a look at one of @biz's investments:

http://www.thekitchn.com/twitter-co-founders-betting-big-on-...

I'm hoping for cloned meat mass grown in some kind of installation, which is for all purposes real meat, rather than plant meat that supposedly tastes like real meat.

There are fields, Neo, endless fields...

I, for one, welcome our vat-grown replicator meat overlords.

I am now forced to quote Douglas Adam's "Restaurant at the End of the Universe:"

"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.

"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.

"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"

"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."

Right now, there aren't any barriers for regular people to raise their meat - if you have some space you can have some chickens there... I don't think changing to a centralized false-meat production and forbidding the free range chicken is the way forward...

IMHO the way forward is to heavily regulate the treatment of animals on farm and largely do away with factory farming. The meat that gets to our table wouldn't even be that much more expensive. Most humanely raised and slaughtered me is only marginally more expensive and that is largely because people are will to pay a premium to know the animal has been treated well. If all animals had to be treated equally well, the prices would drop to near the current prices of factory farmed meats today.

Eliminating meat is a non-answer, but legally requiring the humane treatment of animals raised for slaughter is a platform that you wouldn't have any difficulty getting most Americans behind were it made a national issue.

Most humanely raised and slaughtered meat is only marginally more expensive

The skeptic in me wonders if this is because what you think is humanely raised and slaughtered isn't, really, and plays the rules to earn the label and higher price while only marginally increasing costs.

Alternative terminology can also be used to make high-density confinement sound more palatable. For example: cage-free, free-running, free-roaming, naturally nested, etc. are used as an alternative to the technical term, high-density floor confinement.

Free-range chicken eggs... have no legal definition in the United States.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_range#Free_range_poultry

I haven't a clue what percentage of products that claim they are humanely raised actually are raised that way, but I've seen several documentaries (I don't remember their names) where they interview farmers that raise animals humanely and show how the animals on their farm are treated and in at at least one of these documentaries they showed the slaughter of some chickens and it didn't seem nearly as cruel and inhumane as the slaughtering of chickens in factory farming. With that in mind, I don't know how profitable it was relative to factory farming, but I assume that this farmer was making enough to earn a comfortable living.

Demand for animal food products isn't going away and I can't even imagine the changes that would have to take place in society to change that. With that in mind, it seems like you could literally combine a campaign to create farming jobs and treat animals decently during their lives before being slaughtered and served, based on the simple fact that it will require more labor to meet the national demand for meat.

I would love to see an economic study that measures the differences in labor and total cost of production per pound of meat between a factory farm and a humane farm. I expect the costs to be marginally higher, but that the benefits in terms of jobs and humane animal treatment to far outweigh the negatives. If any political candidate wants to base their platform on producing and protecting agrarian jobs I would expect this to be the platform on which to base it. Plant-based agriculture products are never going to return from factory farming, but animal products could.

You're right, there are very humane farms out there. You're right, demand for meat is only going to keep growing. You're right on many points; I'm just trying to point out that the sticker prices you see on "humane meats" in the grocery store could easily be far less humane than the farms that feature on those documentaries, giving a skewed perception of what "humane meats" actually cost to produce.

Those humane farmers don't nearly satisfy the demand in a he grocery store.

Now they don't but you could phase out inhumane meats the same way that California deals with legislation that regulates the number of cars on the road that need to be electric car.

Just set figures of the percent of meat that needs to be humanely raised reaching 100% in like 10 years. The industry can correct that quickly.

Meat is less efficient but only by a factor of 10 or so. Unless food costs as a proportion of income go up a huge amount it is unlikely people will not be able to afford meat. It may well become less popular. Even well cared for animals are not that much more expensive.

No cite, but even if true. That is today. Things change. Increasing demand for land and water, increasing demand for meat by formally poor peoples in rapidly "industrializing" China/India will skyrocket cost.

Soy lowers your testerone level, so I hope not.

Anyway it is much likelier that we will have labgrown meat, although I guess you would prefer we all go with artificial meat (lab grown meat is real meat, just without the animal. Plant based substitutes are plants).

> Soy lowers your testerone level, so I hope not.

From what I've read, this isn't cut and dried, so citations would be helpful. Wikipedia links to some meta-study that concluded there was no affect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#Men

In any case, there are other plant-based proteins that are not based on soy.

> Animal meat, which has an enormous ecological footprint, is on its way out. I'm not a vegetarian, so I'm not saying this on top of some moral high horse, but it's inefficient and the way animals are raised and slaughtered now is insanely cruel.

Actually there are places where plants are worse. How do you grow cereals in hot or cold areas or in the mountains? You'll need irrigation for the hot one and harvesting is going to suck in the mountains. There's also the issue of deforestation. Instead it's better to raise animals like chicken, sheep or goats and let them feed with the grass that's available.

Regarding efficiency of plants I've heard that hemp (which is much better than soy) is easy to grow, but I'm not sure about this. Maybe someone else has more information about it.

This is a very good reason why Tibetan Buddhists aren't vegetarians; they couldn't survive on plant matter in the high Himalayas, where barely any plant growing agriculture is possible.

Animals are incredibly effective in converting widely dispersed plant matter into something we can actually use for energy. Pigs are even probably the world's best recyclers, able to eat anything (garbage, but hopefully just organic left overs), which we can then benefit from indirectly (there is a good reason why many cultures don't eat pork though, its kind of gross when you think too much about it).

Good point! But we're now talking about growing food industrial style i.e one region produces most of the food for everyone else. In that scenario, plants/vegetarianism might be the better choice. As far as Tibetan Buddhists go, nearly every culture that lives in cold conditions consumes meat in one form or another; I used to think this might be because the calorific content of meat is higher? But your reason seems better

Going in the other direction, you have a country full of vegetarians, India, which is probably the best place for growing things on Earth (at least, India is filled with arable land), and meat probably looks less appealing in that context (less grazing land). Globalization is still not an answer in most of the third world, where they don't have much to trade for food from, for example, the Ukraine or USA bread basket regions; they have to eat local!

There is another interesting story about Coptic Christians in Egypt, pigs, and organic waste collection. The Copts were collecting trash to feed their pigs, but Egypt being mostly Muslim and all told them to kill all their pigs (they were also worried about disease, which could be a valid reason). Anyways, they stopped collecting garbage because no pigs to feed, and the government couldn't supply the garbage collection capacity to fill in the gaps so Cario started smelling very bad. Ah, ecosystems are so fragile and interesting!

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